I've been subscribing to Monthly Applications in Strength Sport for over a year now -- it's a research review primarily intended for competitive powerlifters/bo

I've been subscribing to Monthly Applications in Strength Sport for over a year now -- it's a research review primarily intended for competitive powerlifters/bodybuilders and their trainers, right at the intersection of "we actually have skin in the game and lots of practical experience managing body composition for ourselves and others" and "we know how to interpret studies and perhaps more importantly not over-interpret studies" -- and below is a writeup I did on the topic based on what I've learned from them (and applied to myself very successfully): - forget about the idea of a "diet"; pretty much every popular "diet" doesn't result in sustained fat loss for most people when tested experimentally. if you want to lose body fat and keep it off, what you're trying to do is modify what you habitually eat "ad libitum" (eating freely) such that you end up completely satiated despite eating fewer calories than you do now. (yes, it just comes down to calories; some otherwise-sharp people will misinterpret a few studies to conclude that it doesn't, and those people are wrong.) - there are lots of factors that go into satiety, but one of the most important ones is just having a lot of stuff in your stomach. so, the "caloric density" of what you eat, as in energy per mass, is good to know: if you want to eat less energy, then you want to eat more foods that have few calories per gram, and less foods that have a lot of calories per gram. this mostly reproduces the generic conventional wisdom on what you should be eating -- fruits, vegetables, unprocessed meats, cottage cheese and yogurt, and starches with high water content (potatoes, rice, pasta) are generally your best bets in the former category, while desserts and fast food and so on fall in the latter category -- but there are some surprises you might observe if you actually calculate that "calories per gram" ratio for the stuff you eat, e.g. nuts are ridiculously energy-dense and you should probably eat less of them if you'd benefit from losing body fat. (this doesn't apply to liquids, pretty much every liquid besides milk has negligible effect on satiety.) that said, you shouldn't plan to completely cut out whole categories of food, since that's much harder to adhere to than just eating more of the types of food that will make you full more efficiently. - i believe that macronutrient-focused "diets" typically work for people to the extent that they cause you to accidentally eat a diet with lower caloric density. both carbohydrate intake and fat intake seem to be relatively uncorrelated with how much you eat ad libitum, but the average caloric density of what you eat is a much better predictor of ad libitum caloric intake. (protein is probably good for satiety though independent of caloric density.) - rigorously logging your caloric intake for at least a few months is a good idea for multiple reasons, but i think the most important one is that it helps you develop an intuition for which foods are "worth it" in terms of satiety per calorie and result in you effortlessly hitting your calorie target, especially when fuzzier factors besides caloric density are at play (e.g. your own eating habits around specific foods). when i say "rigorously" i mean weighing absolutely everything you eat or drink unless you have nutrition facts for exactly how much of the thing you ate (i.e. single-serving packaged foods and food from restaurants that give nutrition facts), then looking up how many calories you ate based on how many grams of each thing you ate, and actually logging every single thing with calories that you put in your mouth, not just 80% of it. not everyone has the temperament to do this, and that's fine if you don't, but if you do then i'd highly recommend it. personally i just keep my food log in workflowy (you can use any note-taking app), but you could also look into "noom", which has a nice educational program in addition to the food and weight logging, or "macrofactor", which doesn't have the educational program but does do you the favor of actually telling you your macro intake and estimating your long-run TDEE for you. - even if you're solely trying to lose body fat, regular exercise of some kind is a good idea because your satiety in relation to your energy balance becomes "dysregulated" when you're completely sedentary -- with at least a little exercise, you'll tend to match your caloric intake to your caloric expenditure, but with none at all, you'll be more prone to overeating. as a corollary, exercising a lot for fat loss is probably not a good use of time unless you intrinsically enjoy it, because you'll likely end up compensating for most of the energy you used by eating more.